Looking for Recommendations for Product Merge/Variant Mapping

[March1Studios]

Hi, I'm pretty new to the shopify platform, and I'm just getting started on building my store. One of the main things I've been struggling with is trying to merge different products with the same design on them into a single listing. 

For Example: I've put the design 'Robot Monster' on a Unisex T-Shirt, A Unisex Youth T-Shirt, and two different types of Hoodies.

I'm fine with having the single listings by product - I'm creating areas so people can shop that way. But I'd also like to have 'Design Listings' so people can look at all of the available products with the variant selections. I've played around with creating a custom listing and manually entering in all of the variants, but this is tedious - but the bigger issue is, that the inventory/sales tracks differently.

I can't really use 'Collections', because I'm using that for groupings of designs that all fall in a similar theme, and especially in the case of clothing, I'd prefer if they could just toggle the dropdowns to select the clothes they want to see from a single area. 

To sum up, I want to:

- Group multiple different products with a single design into a single listing

- This isn't for upsell, cross-sell or bundling. If the app solution can do that as well, that's great, but my focus is on design-based listings.

- I'm currently mainly using Printful, and Printify as my suppliers. I'd rather a solution that's not supplier dependant.

- Have inventory and sales synced or tracked with the single listings on shopify.

- Something that will easily automate this because manually creating variants and updating across dozens of products is tedious.

What methods/apps are you using to achieve similar results? Can you show me examples with your store?

Thanks!

[jdawg717]

Hey @March1Studios,

Any luck with this?  I'm trying to do the exact same thing and hours of google/shopify searching have yielded nothing.  Your post seemed to be the most articulate and detailed so I'm hoping that's an indicator of determination and success.  Haha.  Thanks and best wishes!

[March1Studios]

Unfortunately, no. I've used collections to group my designs, but have listed each product individually. There was some custom coding I had to do to create pages and using nested menus, but that's the best I've been able to do.

[jdawg717]

Bummer. But thanks for sharing.  I appreciate your time and your knowledge.  I've come to the same conclusion.  I have listed my products individually and use collections and "you might also like" product highlights.  Thanks again!